Appendix On Implementing District Standards
Beginning the school year with this unit sets the expectation for discovery and productive struggle in the classroom. Students will learn to make use of structure in connecting a community learning experience to the skills they must obtain according to district standards. In Algebra I students are expected to represent data with plots on the real number line (dot plots, histograms, and box plots), use appropriate measures of central tendency, and describe the spread of data. In the Representation Matters unit students will have multiple opportunities to interpret data and present it in various forms. In attempting to represent data, they learn the limitations of certain representations in favor of others which demonstrate the spread more clearly.
In the second half of the unit, students learn to represent bivariate data on scatterplots. Through the scatterplot construction activities, they will meet standards which require them to determine lines of best fit and reflect on the strength of correlation between the variables. Students will interpret the slope and y-intercept of the line of best fit to construct an equation. Discovering the importance of these equations through problem-based learning will help to create a throughline for the functions and linear equations units that follow and are considered the major work of the grade. The experience of creating equations to describe an association that students took interest in investigating, provides a point of reference when more difficult functions are later encountered.
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